The American Style

This semester I am teaching a graduate seminar, and in our session last week we were talking a bit about what it means to be American and what a distinctively ‘American’ take on things is. I’ve never felt particularly ‘American’ in the ‘Anglo-protestant’ sense and my California childhood didn’t prepare me very well for my first experience of WASPism when I moved to Chicago. And of course teaching in Hawai’i where many of your students (or their parents) come from countries in the Asia-Pacific, even simple things like the rules of baseball can’t really be taken for granted when you hold seminars. I’m not complaining — this is a good thing. But it did lead to some fat-chewing as we attempted to figure out exactly what American culture was about.

That evening after the seminar I came home and came across the following sentence — purely by chance — on the Internet: “”His Girl Friday”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032599/ [is] America’s _Rules of the Game_ — if our civilization vanished tomorrow, nearly all of its best and most distinctive aspects could be reconstructed from the slangy, sassy grace of this film’s dialogue.”

And I realized that yes, this was completely and totally true.

The quote comes from Benjamin Schwartz’s recent “round-up of Cary Grant biographies”:http://www.powells.com/review/2007_01_23. It is an absolutely lovely little little piece of criticism, mostly because of its judicious clipping of good lines about Cary Grant from other pieces about him (“Grant possessed a technical command…so complete it is barely noticeable”) as well as a few of his own (“Grant found a novel way to treat women in film: he clearly related to his heroine as a sexually attractive woman — and also as a witty, intelligent, and idiosyncratic one. Often he conveyed this by adopting the seemingly obvious but previously overlooked strategy of simply listening to her”)

Grant, of course, is the ultimate mid-Atlantic actor. But he is also impossible to overlook (“who else is James Bond,” as someone once put it, “but Cary Grant with a gun?”). Reading Schwartz’s piece helped me realize that as some one whose identity was forged — in both senses of the word — he is in some sense the ultimate American, or at least his screwball comedies like His Girl Friday do epitomize the “slangy, sassy grace” that is so typical of one sector of our country’s soul.